NHRA Funny Cars and Top Fuel dragsters race on the same tracks most weekends, but rarely at the same time.
That changed at the 49th Night Under Fire exhibition event at Summit Motorsports Park in Norwalk, Ohio, where the King of Nitro was crowned.
The event featured knockout tournaments for each class with the winners moving on to the mixed final.
Funny Car driver Ron Capps and Top Fuel driver Maddi Gordon, who are teammates at Ron Capps Motorsports, advanced to the headline race.
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Top Fuel and Funny Cars use the same engines, but the lighter Top Fuel cars typically run quicker times, so the start was staggered with the goal of creating a close finish, with Capps getting a .18 second head start.
In the end, it wasn’t even close. Capps had a much quicker reaction time and crossed the finish line first with a comfortable lead, despite running a 3.843 sec elapsed time at 333.91 mph to Gordon’s 3.733 sec at 338.00 mph.
“You can’t even dream up something like this,” Capps told NHRA.com. “We thought we had the disadvantage with the stagger. Guido [Antonelli, his crew chief] wanted to test something since we got here, and we didn’t get a chance to do that with the weather today, so he leaned in and said, ‘We’re testing it right now in the final against Maddi,’ and I was like, ‘Oh no.’ But I stepped on the gas and around 300 feet out, this thing put me in the trunk and just took off. I was looking for Maddi’s little wheel out the side the whole way down, then all of a sudden my scoreboard came on.”
Capps is the current NHRA Funny Car points leader while Gordon sits sixth in Top Fuel heading into the Brainerd Nationals on the weekend of Aug. 20-23.
